The Past Tense in Polish and French: A Semantic Approach to Translation (original) (raw)

THE NOTION OF COMPLETION IN MODERN GREEK: AN ANALYSIS OF ASPECTIVELY ADVERSATIVE SENTENCES

Doctoral dissertation, 2019

The present dissertation concerns the notion of completion and how it is lingually expressed in Modern Greek. Within the framework of the research, aspectively adversative sentences were analysed. Based on the results, a set of postulates describing a fragment of the Modern Greek aspective reality is proposed. Then, Hampel and Oppenheim’s (1948) deductive model of explanation is employed, in order to verify the adequacy of the proposed theory. It is the first work in Modern Greek aspectology that employs the postulational method and the deductive model of explanation. Among the assumptions made in the dissertation are: 1) completion is a complex meaning involving obligatorily the meaning of termination and holicity (the property of being whole), 2) holic completion should not be confused with partitive completion, 3) the meaning of termination may be lexified (conveyed by lexical morphs) or semified (conveyed by affixes) whereas the meaning of holicity is solely lexified in Modern Greek, and 4) forms of momentous verbs lexify simultaneously termination and holicity. In the light of the above assumptions, the following three groups of Modern Greek verb forms have been distinguished: 1) autosignificators of completion, that is sufficient significators (markers) of completion, 2) cosignificators of completion, which convey completion jointly with lexificators of holicity, and 3) lexificators of completion, which refer to events composed of completed subevents.

Polish verbal aspect and its Finnish statistical correlates in the light of a parallel corpus

2019

The objective of this contrastive research is (1) to determine the rules of correlation between the language-specific category Polish Verbal Aspect (PVA) and the elements of Finnish clause, whilst (2) re-examining the semantic scope of PVA, and (3) improving the definition of the cross-linguistically valid comparative concept of aspectuality. The investigation is empirical, and based on 900 Polish-Finnish clauses compiled in the form of a bidirectional parallel corpus stratified in three samples according to text types. The corpus is annotated on three levels, following the scalar model of temporality: the morphosyntactic and semantic clause-internal levels, as well as the clause-external level, including such elements as taxis and the quantificationalpragmatic context, temporally located (existentially quantified) situation, and generic or generalising interpretation (universal quantification). The reasoning in the study is mostly inductive. In contrast to the previous studies on a...

TENSE AND ASPECT IN XHOSA

2021

This dissertation investigates the semantics of each tense and aspect in Xhosa. Since tense and aspect perform important pragmatic functions, the analysis takes into account the correlation between the verb and the wider discourse in which it is embedded.

Aspectuality across languages: Event construal in speech and gesture

2018

The book provides a nuanced, multimodal perspective on how people express events via certain grammatical forms of verbs in speech and certain qualities of movement in manual gestures. The volume is the outcome of an international project that involved three teams: one each from France, Germany, and Russia, including scholars from the Netherlands and the United States. Aspect and gesture use are studied in three Indo-European languages, i.e. French, German, and Russian. The book also summarizes the main points and arguments from French, German, and Russian works on aspect in relation to tense, bringing these historical traditions together for an English-speaking reading audience. The work rekindles some fundamental theorizing about events and aspect, reinvigorating it in a new light with the use of recent theorizing from cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology, as well as new research methods applied to new data from actual spoken, interactive language use. It illustrates the value of researching the variably multimodal nature of communication – as well as theoretical issues in connection with thinking for speaking and mental simulation – from an empirical point of view.